A Deeper Well
Jim James, Iron & Wine, Waxahatchee, and Spacey Kacey
Windshield cracked
Braves hat on the dash
Georgia sticker on the back
We found the world’s biggest love
Hidden in a little pickup truck
—Tara Thompson
Tara is a friend of the Swap. Check out her new song, Little Pickup Truck here. Keep scrolling for a phenomenal Bonus Track that covers Kacey Musgraves’ new album, Deeper Well. Between now and then, you’ll find three song recs from Jonathan, Ben, and Kody. Enjoy!
Here in Spirit by Jim James (Jonathan)
Jim James might be better known as the lead of My Morning Jacket, but he has also released solo albums. My pick this week is off of his 2016 album titled Eternally Even. While some of his solo work is harder, much of it is great for easy listening in the background. This album in particular has a nice groove, and I like to play it while I work.
Call It Dreaming by Iron & Wine (Ben)
I saw Iron & Wine at a small venue with a good friend 20 years ago. He was a music guy and knew they had a new album out -- I heard songs like Cinder and Smoke; Naked As We Came for the first time…. Smitten.
We didn’t have a Spotify DJ to introduce us to new music so it felt like finding gold. They drop a new album next week and I need to go hear them live again soon. When I do, I hope they play Call it Dreaming… and I’ll sing, “Where the time of our lives is all we have, and we get a chance to say - before we ease away, for all the love you’ve left behind - you can have mine.”
Peace and Quiet by Waxahatchee (Kody)
I wrote this entry in March as I listened to Waxahatchee’s song Peace and Quiet for the first time. My friend Scott told me about Waxahatchee, a project of Katie Crutchfield’s, whose singing attitude and voice remind me of Alanis Morissette circa Jagged Little Pill, but with more than a hint of southern-rock-alt-country.
I’ve enjoyed every first-time song I’ve heard from Waxahatchee thus far, and last night, with my friend Scott, I enjoyed Waxahatchee live in concert for the first time on her Tigers Blood tour. There’s nothing like seeing someone live for the first time.
Bonus Track: A Review of Kacey Musgraves’ Deeper Well (Interscope / MCA Nashville, 2024) by Aaron Cline Hanbury
I don’t like country music, and I generally try to skip it. But some time in 2021, I heard football savant Trevor Lawrence say he warms up with an artist in his ears named Kacey Musgraves. Dutifully, I listened.
I should clarify that I grant a fair amount of leeway to folk and Americana and a highly specific sub-genre called stomp and holler. What I’m averse to is the cheap, manufactured twang of Nashville stars and starlettes, especially when it plays under the stereotypical, intellectually offensive lyrics I associate with the Hit in a Box genre. But truthfully even the supposedly good stuff — thinking Jason Isbell here — rings too Cracker Barrel for me. With Musgraves, though, both lyre and libretto sound different.
About a month ago, she dropped her sixth studio album, Deeper Well. To my ear, this marks an even less country-forward effort than her usual light touch, which generally I take as a positive attribute. It’s not exactly like she’s posturing for a crossover into pop, though. Compared to her earliest and earlier stuff, this record sounds quieter and moodier, a little more intimate. Though it appears less in Deeper Well, Musgraves’s knack for tinkering with certain Daft Punk elements gives her music the kind of perspective on country that Justin Vernon has long provided to folk.
As if the cover art doesn’t go far enough, the album opens with some grassiness. The spacious, tinny intro to “Cardinal” evokes The Mamas and the Papas, as Musgraves considers life after the death of a friend (who is reincarnated as a bird?). My guess is she’d rebuff the idea of Deeper Well as a concept album, but you’re not paying attention if you miss the narrative she constructs, starting with this brush with death and concluding her breathy, lyrically rich benediction, “Nothing to Be Scared of”
The title track, “Deeper Well,” makes clear what’s going on. And if “concept” misrepresents it, you could call it a testimony. It’s a kind of memory of her growth from young and dumb into, ahem, a deeper self. Drugs. A since-failed romance. These represent shallow wells. Or maybe I’m projecting the failed-romance part. Most of the time, I’d accuse someone of poor form for reading biography into art. Yet with “Deeper Well” and Deeper Well it seems inevitable. The whole album presumes you know at least some of the particulars of Musgraves’s previous marriage and her newfound love. In the vein of fellow pop divas like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Adele, Musgraves issues her own account of her publicly known personal life.
Of course the break up genre isn’t new, and really it’s pretty boring. Thankfully, her account doesn’t stop there. Her musings about life and death and love step over onto existential, even theological, terrain. Beyond the Trevor Lawrence and Justin Vernon bits, this shows you why I’ve come to enjoy Musgraves’s music. She’s willing, if not anxious, to push a little further.
In this case, unfortunately, you’re nine just-fine songs in before you get to “The Architect,” but this is where Musgraves finds her stride.
It’s the most upbeat track of the whole record, more traditionally country and certainly more traditionally Musgraves, and it gives Musgraves’s grappling with belief and experience and how the two inform each other. A reviewer at Pitchfork put it this way: “The Architect” exhibits a “nesting Russian doll structure, mirroring Musgraves’ worried spiral about whether there’s logic to the universe.” The nesting doll structure seems right, but to say she sings about “logic to the universe” neuters what’s going on: She’s questioning whether or not God has a plan for this planet and those of us who live there, while showing some frustration at her lack of access to such a plan. There’s a difference. Asking about logic in the universe is collegiate and a bit trite. Questioning a God you once thought you understood is a human inquiry more universal than break-up anthems. Truer.
And if you come from a certain tradition of American Christianity, you can’t miss her allusions to an apple in the beginning, potter’s clay, and Young Earth Creationism, just like you can’t help but recall her conclusion in “Deeper Well”: “The things I was taught only took me so far.”
She follows “The Architect” with “Lonely Millionaire,” which I can only describe as a slow jam, “Heaven Is,” a gorgeously paced musing that’s both on the easier side lyrically and the one song I’ve found myself unconsciously singing days after hearing it, and “Anime Eyes,” a lush, singable track that gives the feel of an Avett Brothers-Taylor Swift song baby (in this instance, that’s a good thing).
I do have complaints. For everything Musgraves is trying to do personally and lyrically, the album is just a downer, and at its worst it’s a monotone downer. Probably the most damning reality is that, if you’ve got Deeper Well going, it’s too easy not to notice any differences in the tracks. If you even notice you’ve got music on in the first place.
In all, Deeper Well forms an interesting, intriguing, boundary-questioning album. I like it. It doesn’t soar like some of Musgraves’s earlier work — her peak achievement remains “Space Cowboy” on 2018’s Golden Hour — and I can’t help but wish it were just a bit more fun. Put differently, the strength of Deeper Well is in its steps away from country music, even though it just may not be country enough. So, yeah, I’d like a little more country.
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My name is Aaron Cline Hanbury, and I’m a writer and editor in Atlanta. The first album I ever bought with my own money was Weezer’s blue album, and I played it so loud in my ’96 green Saturn. To this day “My Name Is Jonas” shoots me up with every feel. At my wedding, I first-danced with my wife to “Crystalized” by Young the Giant, an outfit I’ve caught live on each of its tours. Profiling the mesmerizingly talented Sameer Gadhia, way back in 2016, still stands as a career highlight.
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